What’s the difference between what the Eastern European cyber-hacking group known as Darkside did to the Colonial Pipeline and what President Joe Biden wants to do?
Answer: About 15 years.
Darkside was able to shut down the top U.S. fuel pipeline operated by Colonial Pipeline Co., which moves gasoline along a 5,500-mile system from New Jersey to Texas and provides 45 percent of the fuel consumed on the East Coast, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Biden has the same goal of shutting down Colonial and other fossil-fuel moving pipelines, he just intends to take a little longer.
The primary difference, besides their timelines for shutdown, is Darkside says it shut down Colonial for profit, Biden wants to do it for politics.
Voters got a glimpse of Biden’s shutdown goal on January 20. On his first day as president, he canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline that had been a political football for a decade.
And he may not stop there. As the Associated Press reported last January, “After President Joe Biden revoked the Keystone XL’s presidential permit and shut down construction of the long-disputed pipeline that was to carry oil from Canada to Texas, opponents of other pipelines hoped the projects they’ve been fighting would be next.”
Indeed, relying on court challenges and public demonstrations to create roadblocks to new pipeline construction has become a favored tool by environmental activists.
So if a major pipeline company gets hacked and shuts down operations, as happened to Colonial, why work as diligently as the Biden administration says it is to get the pipeline up and running as quickly as possible? Doesn’t Biden realize that if he is successful gasoline will flow to destinations where it will be burned, putting carbon into the atmosphere?
The answer must be that Biden knows the U.S. economy would collapse without fossil fuels—and he doesn’t want that on his watch.
Environmentalists have tried for more than a decade to convince the public that the United States is on the cusp of an affordable, clean energy economy, if only government would throw more taxpayer dollars at clean energy projects—which, not incidentally, will financially benefit environmentalists and their financial backers.
Biden and former President Barack Obama both embraced that vision—and may even believe it. Biden is certainly doing his best to throw taxpayer dollars at it.
But the real test may come with the pending debate over Biden’s erroneously named “infrastructure bill”—since only a small portion of it funds what most people call infrastructure.
Will Biden work with Republicans to funnel resources toward major infrastructure challenges, like cybersecurity for the electric grid and pipelines? Darkside’s successful hack shows where the real need lies.
May 11, 2021